Electronic mail, or email, is a widespread, heavily used software tool for exchanging messages among users over a communications network, such as the Internet. Anyone with an email-enabled computing device, such as a desktop or laptop computer, workstation, personal digital assistant, or cell phone, with a wireless or wired connection to the network, can send email messages to the electronic mailboxes of others users similarly connected to the network. A typical business user can receive several hundred email messages in the course of a day. Moreover, users often save a copy of each self-generated mail message, whether that mail message is a newly composed mail message or a reply to or a forwarding of a received message. Unless proactively and regularly managed, users' mailboxes thus become cluttered with saved email messages, many of which have outlived their usefulness.
Disadvantages inherent to mailbox clutter are evident. Organizations need to spend more on their mail servers to maintain the large number of saved email messages and employees are less efficient when having to sort through many irrelevant emails. Notwithstanding such disadvantages, mailbox clutter still grows because users do not want to delete immediately email messages that may have some time-limited usefulness (e.g., until a scheduled meeting occurs with the email message sender). Many users, however, forget to delete these email messages after their period of usefulness has passed. Thus, there is a need for a system and method that can help email users reduce the clutter of email messages in their mailboxes and organizations manage costs for maintaining email accounts.